Once turned on, the camera comes to life, offering the choice of programmed autoexposure, aperture or shutter-priority autoexposure or full manual exposure.

The camera uses an electronically controlled vertically traveling metal focal-plane shutter with times running from 16 seconds to an astounding 1/8000th of a second plus B. That puts it in the league of the upper tier of SLRs. Most P&S cameras top out at about 1/750.

The passive autofocus generally is spot on. There is a manual-focus option that is a great concept but in operation is too fussy to use more than occasionally.

To get the camera into the autoeverything mode, simply set all controls to "A."

You can lock the focus and exposure with the usual half-depress of the shutter release. This is useful when you don't want your subject in the center of the frame. Both settings are held until you either release the shutter or take a photo.

To use one or more of the camera's manual settings, turn the aperture ring to select the f/stop, for example. To manually set the shutter speed, lightly push down the center of the shutter speed knob; it pops up. Now turn it to the shutter speed you want.

To manually focus the camera, push down the center of the distance dial. Identical to the shutter-speed dial, it also pops up. While looking through the viewfinder, turn the distance dial and follow the on-screen indicators until a green dot is visible. Objects in the viewfinder do not move in or out of focus. You must rely on the distance indicator, unless you happen to have a handheld rangefinder with you.

When shooting in the dark, the green LEDs in the viewfinder create too much light, making it difficult to compose your scene.

The viewfinder doesn't automatically correct for parallax error, and an advanced camera such as this should have that feature. There are indicator marks in the framelines that provide for user compensation ... if the user understands what the marks means and if the user remembers to follow them. The top deck's LCD screen has a backlight, which is helpful in low-light situations. Using any of the controls activates the backlight, which then turns itself off after about five seconds.

After three minutes, the camera retracts the lens and shuts down -- an annoying behavior that is repeated with other Rollei cameras. It would be nice to be able to set the shutdown period or turn it off altogether.